Sitting in my bathtub one night, watching a TV movie, the ending shot seemed to never end. (My TV training told me the show must have run short and they were filling time.) As the main character looked soulfully as his true love departed, something inside urged me to get to the piano quickly. I did and my hands played a new musical theme as if the notes had been stored there all along, waiting to come out. Over the next few months I worked out the variations.
One night Emma Lou was at my home and asked me to play one of my compositions. As I played “Thinking of You” on the piano, her eyes lit up. “I hear words,” she said and asked for a piece of paper. In 15 minutes she had written the lyrics to this song.
Before this piece had a title I played it for a visitor from Poland. In broken English she described her feelings. It’s like two lovers quarrelling. They don’t want to hurt each other so they say, “Don’t Cry.”
This is the first piece I composed after cancer treatment began. Whenever I play this at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, people stop to listen rather than just walking by with the 30s pop songs.
In the high deserts of the West, summer rain storms come in quickly. Lightning crackles and rain pounds down. Then, as quickly as the storms blow in, they stop. The Electric Rain has refreshed us again.
For Jeffrey Ball and Todd Wilson, Mormon missionaries assassinated LaPaz, Bolivia, May 24, 1989.
This event occurred when I was working as the producer of the noon news at KSL-TV in Salt Lake City. The station decided to broadcast the missionaries’ funeral, which took place at noon during the time we would be on the air with the news.
Coincidentally, I was on vacation that day and was home watching the funeral on TV instead of working. I was very touched by the service — the idea that two idealistic young men volunteered to try to make the world better but were shot down simply because of who they were — Americans. The event inspired me to write this tribute to them. Several of the movements incorporate various church hymn tunes about missionary service. (All these hymn tunes can be seen on the sheet music; only one is recorded since I didn’t have over-dubbing capability when I recorded it.)
If I had been working on the newscast that day, instead of home watching the newscast, I would have been caught up in the mechanics of getting the broadcast on the air and wouldn’t have been touched by the event. But at home, as a viewer, I could feel the inspiration to write my feelings into music.
The sheet music doesn’t quite fit the recorded piece. In the recording, the left hand is playing in 3/4 time and the right hand is playing in 4/4 time (like chewing gum and patting your head at the same time.) Give it a try.
This song was inspired by this passage:
Last week, I stood in a little meadow below our cabin, up to my waist in green plants. Slowly, I rotated in a circle, looking at what was growing within a three-foot radius. I counted twenty-three different varieties, none of them trees or shrubs, none of them flowering, all of them a different shade of green. To perceive each of those aspects of green, texture, and shape without being able to name them, describe them or probably even remember them accurately, was an exhilarating revelation of how highly God values diversity in even little things.
God doesn’t plant lawns. He plants meadows.
Lavina Fielding Anderson, “In the Garden God Hath Planted,” Sunstone, 14, no. 5 (October 1990): 24 – 27.
I wrote this for my niece, Jessica, a cellist, who was in junior high. She could play it with her friend, a violinist, and her father, a pianist.
A Christmas piece for choir.
Based on “O My Father” words by Eliza R. Snow, music by James McGranahan.
LDS hymn #292
Hymns by Women – a medley for 2 violins & piano
Father in Heaven, We Do Believe by Jane Romney Crawford
We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet by Caroline Sheridan Norton
Oh Say, What Is Truth? by Ellen Knowles Melling
I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go by Carrie E. Rounsefell
Teach Me to Walk in the Light by Clara W. McMaster
Love One Another by Luacine Clark Fox
Sunday, January 2, 2000
In a church meeting Emma Lou Thayne talked about how moved she was watching the millennium celebrations around the world the day before. When she sat down, I said to her, “I hear lyrics to a song.”
The next day, she brought me the words and I began working on the music. Thus became another collaboration of one of us being inspired by the work of the other. (The first is her writing words to my music of “Thinking of You.”)